After being rousted from bed, handcuffed for three hours and questioned until 5:30 a.m., Todd Ewalt was getting a break.

With the morning sun now up, Todd, clad in a T-shirt, sweatpants and slippers, could finally begin to grieve for his wife and be with his children.

Todd’s first call was to his mother, Margaret, and her second husband, Vince Moran, a retired cop and former journalist from New Jersey now living in Tempe, Ariz. The couple booked the next plane for Harrisburg.

State police wanted Todd to come to the Troop H barracks near routes 22 and 39 at 11 a.m. the next morning for more questions.

After spending the night at a nearby motel — his house remained a crime scene — Todd arrived at the barracks 15 minutes early. He wouldn’t leave until 9:45 p.m.

What transpired was a complete dissection of his life, his personality, his finances and his marriage.

Police drilled Todd on what they portrayed as his collapsing marriage. They argued that he and his wife had grown apart.

She was taking trips without him. She was staying up late talking on the phone with other men. She was driving off for days supposedly to deliver items that could have been shipped Federal Express.

Detectives showed Todd what they claimed was Darlene’s divorce filing. “It dawned on me that it wasn’t even her handwriting,” Todd recalls.

Next, they went after his bank account. He was a carpenter, bills were piling up and work was spotty. Darlene must have resented being forced to toil in the couple’s side business, handcrafting synthetic racing saddles to make ends meet, they told him.

One of the secondary detectives even drew Todd a picture of the hooked, jagged-edge knife that police believed was the murder weapon. It was as if they were saying, ‘We know you have one just like it — somewhere.’

As police fired questions ranging from the couple’s sleeping patterns to their sex life, Todd mostly kept his cool. But he couldn’t win. One of the officers suggested to Todd that he was wrapped too tight and must have snapped.

Yet when Todd pushed back against relentless police accusations, it was proof of something else.

After a barrage of belittling over his bank account, Todd defiantly pulled out his wallet and plucked out a thick wad of cash — nearly $1,200. He challenged anyone in the interview room to match the sum. “We weren’t rich, but we weren’t in financial trouble,” Todd says. “The bills were paid.”

To investigators, Todd’s flash of defensiveness was a glimpse of his deep-seated rage. If they could push his buttons so easily, perhaps an unhappy wife could cause him to go nuclear.

Again and again, hour after hour, Todd denied murdering his wife.

He even took a lie-detector test. Forty-five minutes later, a detective returned and promptly informed Todd that he had failed it.

Not knowing if the officer was lying, Todd shot back that the results had to be wrong. Either that, or the machine wasn’t working. To this day, he doesn’t know the actual results.

It was a stalemate, and it was back to Square One — another wave of the same basic questions couched in different words and in new tones. After a round of goading, another officer would try sympathy.

“Accidents happen,” Todd recalls one of the empathetic detectives saying. “We’ll take care of everything for you. Just tell us what happened.”

“I’m thinking, ‘Do you really think I’m that stupid?’”

For Todd, a fan of the documentary-style detective show “The First 48,” all of it was sounding very familiar. He realized police were pulling out all the stops to pin him as the suspect.

“Just stupid tactics,” he says. “They were throwing everything at the wall to see if it stuck.”

As the hours ticked by, Todd Ewalt’s family — particularly his gruff-voiced stepfather, Vince Moran, grew wary. The veteran journalist was well-acquainted with investigative techniques and interview tactics. He suspected that police were eyeing Todd for Darlene’s murder, and he insisted to other family members that it was time to get Todd some help.

The family phoned an attorney. “He’s in there all those hours,” Moran recalls. “It went on and on. They kept trying to pin it on him. Eventually I said, ‘Get him a lawyer.’ We retained someone on the spot.”

The newly hired lawyer first phoned the barracks to halt the questioning, but it wasn’t until the attorney showed up that the interrogation stopped.

The long day of questioning was over, but the police’s pursuit didn’t end there.

According to Ewalt family members, the family home was searched a second time later that weekend. A police helicopter swooped low and snapped aerial photographs of the house and grounds.

Officers in unmarked cars kept the house and family under surveillance from the parking lot of Pavone’s, a nearby restaurant. Detectives repeatedly asked to speak with Todd, but he now insisted that all questions be funneled through his lawyer.

A married female friend worried that Todd, who lost 25 pounds during the ordeal, wasn’t eating and decided to take him out for dinner and a movie. This prompted police to question friends about “Todd’s girlfriend” — even though the woman’s husband knew all about the outing.

To this day, Ewalt family members are convinced that police informed Nick’s college about his status as a suspect, as well as the steroids found in his bedroom. Nick was never charged for possessing the drugs, but his football scholarship was revoked the following year.

Marsico confirmed that by “lawyering up,” Todd Ewalt only piqued the interest of investigators. And while Marsico said he wasn’t privy to all of the tactics used during the investigation, he doesn’t doubt that state police kept very close tabs on Todd and, to a lesser extent, Nick. “I think cops, by their nature, anytime someone gets an attorney, they think the person’s guilty,” Marsico explains. “I’ve got a little different slant on that, but not too much.”

Yet for all their questions, police still had nothing to go on. Not a shred of direct evidence linked Todd Ewalt to his wife’s murder. And with Todd now deflecting interrogation, police needed another tact or their investigation risked growing cold.

Marsico had just the thing, one of the most powerful tools of prosecutors.

The district attorney was preparing to impanel a grand jury with full subpoena powers to probe Darlene Ewalt’s murder.

The grand jury would compel Todd and Nick to testify. True, suspects could “plead the Fifth” and refuse to answer questions directly implicating them in the crime. But they would be forced to answer other queries about relationships and finances.

The grand jury could command phone records, banking information, credit card bills and other private files. Most of all, the grand jury had the option of issuing a presentment that could lead directly to charges against Todd Ewalt in the murder of his wife.